lite.cnn.io

This little website pulls in all the main stories from CNN and strips almost everything from the design; styles, images, fonts, ads, colors. Nada, zilch, gone. At first it looks like nothing but hypertext and it feels like an extraordinary improvement but Sam Saccone made a thread about potential improvements that the team could use to make that experience even faster such as server side rendering and replacing the React framework with something smaller, like Preact.

Either way this approach to news design is refreshing. However, I can’t find anything more about the the motivations for building this version of CNN.com besides the announcement on Twitter. It would certainly be fascinating to learn if CNN built this specifically for people caught in disastrous situations where battery life and load time might be a serious matter of life and death.